CDR: Re: Jim Bell arrested, documents online

[Sampo A Syreeni]

On Tue, 21 Nov 2000, Ray Dillinger wrote:

>http://www.jya.com/ap.htm.  It seems to me that he has a
>not-very-realistic view of how laws are interpreted in
>courts, and no understanding at all that governments will
>make new laws or amend old ones as needed to cover new
>situations.

>From what I gather from the document, the Jim's presentation seems only to
chart the current situation, be based on the assumption that police state
tactics aren't employed (of course they are, one very real use of AP as a
theory is to highlight that it is impossible to both have civil rights *and*
control people by force simultaneously after sufficiently strong and error
resilient anonymity has arrived) and most of all, the wording suggests that
Jim, very wisely, was trying to cover his butt. Not surprisingly, and
precisely as you say, the Men with Guns do not seem to care.

>Even if they couldn't find a specific law to charge the
>operator of an AP server with, or couldn't get a conviction
>on the laws they'd charged him/her with, they would doubtless
>issue a court order commanding the operators of the server
>to cease and desist.

Yep. That's probably one side of the whole argument: if you try to control
people by force when they have strong anonymity available, they'll have very
efficient means of resisting the control. Short of really dumping every
civil right there is and putting up a Big Brother effort Orwell himself
couldn't envision there is very little that can be done. Hence, the only way
to reconsile anonymity with a fair state monopoly on violence is to
minimize the state and the violence it exerts.  This neatly sums up both AP
and most cypherpunkish ideas on cryptoanarchy and libertarianism.

Sampo Syreeni <decoy at iki.fi>, aka decoy, student/math/Helsinki university